


There's A Pirate In My Soup

by eena



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-18
Updated: 2007-04-18
Packaged: 2019-02-05 17:22:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12798897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eena/pseuds/eena
Summary: ‘End of the world’ can be interpreted many ways . . .





	1. Chapter 1  Not Exactly A Garnish

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Haven, the archivist: This story was originally archived at [Fandom Haven Story Archive (FHSA)](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Haven_Story_Archive), was scheduled to shut down at the end of 2016. To preserve the archive, I began working with the OTW to transfer the stories to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2017. If you are this creator and the work hasn't transferred to your AO3 account, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Fandom Haven Story Archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/fhsa/profile).

“Is your soup ready?”

 

Willow Rosenburg swallowed the sigh of frustration that had tried to make its way out of her mouth. Previous subtle signs of her annoyance had gotten her nowhere, and therefore she would no longer be wasting her time with them. It was time for the direct approach.

 

Face schooled into a rather perfect picture of aggravation, Willow looked up from her work to give Dawn Summers a well-deserved glare. “It’s not soup,” she said, for what had to be the fifteenth time that day.

 

The younger woman scoffed, brushing strands of brown hair away from her face as she darted closer to peer over the edge of Willow’s cauldron. After a few seconds, she raised her head and wrinkled her nose. “Smells like soup,” she countered.

 

“It’s a potion,” Willow insisted, nudging the other girl not-so-gently with her elbow to move her away from said cauldron. “And it would probably be better if you stopped sniffing it all the time.”

 

“What would the sniffing matter, if it wasn’t soup?” Dawn asked, her eyes triumphant.

 

“Dawnie, really, what is the whole annoying thing today? Are you bored?”

 

“No,” she protested, her face almost indignant. “Well, yes, but that’s not the point. It looks like soup, smells like soup-”

 

“But is a potion for dissolving the bodies of Feryktar demons so the decomposing acids from their corpses don’t end up causing an environmental catastrophe,” Willow stated firmly as she gave the contents of her cauldron a good stirring.

 

“Fine, then it’s witch soup,” Dawn replied breezily. “You know, if you’re going to use a cauldron that freaking big, you could have at least dressed up all in black, chanted those lines from MacBeth, and cackle with great frequency. This would be less boring that way.”

 

“I’m not staging a theatrical production while making potions just because you’re bored,” Willow retorted. “You should have thought of your boredom before you opted for a summer at Cleveland HQ.”

 

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Please, how was I supposed to know that this Hellmouth would be boring? Sunnydale was always hopping-even on days when it wasn’t supposed to be hopping. This place so does not measure up.”

 

“Again, it’s Cleveland Ohio,” Willow spared the girl a small smile. “Hellmouth or not, nothing’s going to change that. You should have accepted Giles’s invitation for a stint in Paris.”

 

“But there’s no Scoobies there!” Dawn whined. “You’re the only stationary one at the moment. And since I miss having Scooby filled days, I came here.”

 

“You could have gone with Buffy on her rounds,” Willow reminded her.

 

“Yeah, and watch her suck face with the Immortal the entire time?” Dawn made a face. “Please, I have to deal with enough of that at home. I shouldn’t have to put up with it on my supposed vacation time.”

 

“You have a point there,” Willow muttered as she moved away from the huge cauldron situated in the middle of her workshop and ambled over to her desk to look over her spell book quickly. “But despite all the hooplah, this ain’t no Sunnydale. So if you’re looking forward to an action-packed summer reminiscent of the old days, you might be out of luck. There are too many Slayers here for any action to be left over for the likes of us.”

 

“Oh right,” Dawn grumbled, a scowl on her face. “Why did we activate all of them again?”

 

“End of the world?”

 

“Oh right, that,” Dawn pouted at the cauldron in front of her and gave it a listless kick. “Don’t suppose there’s anywhere that I can put in a request for some entertainment, is there?”

 

Willow gave a shrug. “Well, I hear D’Hoffryn’s still trying to recruit more bitter, delusional, and depressed people into the vengeance gig. Anya was sounded like she had lots of fun during her time at it.”

 

“Very funny,” Dawn growled. “Would it kill you to be a bit more understanding of my-”

 

A sudden thunderous boom resonated off the walls of the workroom, effectively cutting off anything the teenager was saying. Willow gasped as her hands instinctively went to clamp over her ears, eyes searching the room for any sign of trouble as the noise faded.

 

Seconds ticked by and when nothing happened, Willow inched closer to Dawn, eyes still scanning the room as she asked: “What was that?”

 

Dawn opened her mouth, but didn’t manage to get one word out before the sounds of splashing and cursing filled the room. Startled, Dawn gave a yelp and immediately stepped up to Willow’s side as she tried to find the source of the noise.

 

She found it soon enough. There, floundering around in Willow’s ridiculously huge cauldron, was a man. At least, Dawn thought it was a man. All she could really see was wet clothes stained various shades of brown because of the potion and long dark hair plastered across the stranger’s face. But the voice that was doing all the cursing definitely sounded male, and therefore Dawn was pretty sure it was a man-though she wasn’t sure where he came from or how he ended up in Willow’s cauldron.

 

The stranger finally stopped splashing about and yanked his hair out of his face. Dawn and Willow were treated to the sight of a tanned face with a braided goatee, complete with beads, a red bandana that struggled to keep clumps of tangled hair at bay, and dark eyes outlined with liner. He was dressed in what had to be the stupidest outfit Dawn had seen in ages, not to mentioned the rattiest. And in his hand, which was adorned with a couple of gaudy-looking rings, there was one of those old styled three corner hats.

 

The man saw them as well, his confusion easily readable on his face as he gave them and the room a look over. He seemed to be unsteady on his feet, as he was still kind of swaying about there in the cauldron, and as he raised his left hand, it took him a little while to get it straight and pointed in the right direction. Their direction.

 

“And who might you lassies be?”

 

He had a weird accent, and his words were kind of slurring over. When he spoke, Dawn caught sight of stained teeth intermingled with gold ones. She took a closer look at him and noticed he had a few tattoos on his arm. One of them looked like a bird . . .

 

“Who are we? Who are you?” Willow had snapped out of her stupor and was now glaring very menacingly at the strange man in her cauldron. Well, as menacingly as she could look, which wasn’t that menacing because Willow really was too adorable to be taken so seriously. At least, she was too adorable if she wasn’t in Darth Willow mode. Nothing too cute about that.

 

“Me?” The man seemed taken back by Willow’s question. He leant back and pressed a hand to his chest, swaying slightly as he finally answered her question. “Well, I’m Captain Jack Sparrow of course. And this most certainly isn’t the inside of a Kraken, unless it is and all the stories I’ve heard are nothing more than horrendous lies.”

 

And then it clicked for Dawn. She watched as the man, Jack Sparrow as he called himself, continued to ramble on, words slurring and blending together in almost unintelligible verbal vomit that Willow struggled to understand, and then Dawn got it. He was dressed like an idiot. Had gross teeth, weird tattoos, and beads in his hair. His accent was most definitely not American, and he was talking about the Kraken-a monster of the seas if she remembered correctly.

 

All of this information came together and crowded around in Dawn’s brain until it just snapped into all the right places. She nudged Willow repeatedly, her later nudges harder than the first ones because the witch wasn’t really paying her too much attention at the moment. But once Willow did turn away from the crazy man in her cauldron and looked over at Dawn, Dawn revealed her discovery.

 

“Willow, there’s a pirate in your soup.”

 

~*~


	2. Chapter 2  Always Wash Your Hands

Rupert Giles was, on some occasion, rather unhelpful. He didn’t mean to be, but sometimes he just couldn’t help it. Dawn knew this, and she understood that Giles was a hardworking man who just tried to do his best every day, and the unhelpful times were just a rare but unavoidable collection of off days. Everybody had them. Dawn was just a little annoyed that Giles would have to have one of his off days on this day.

 

There was a freaking pirate in Willow’s witch soup, and all the guy could say was ‘keep on eye on the fellow until I get there’. To say it was disappointing would be the biggest understatement of the year. Especially since the ‘fellow’ in question appeared to be a drunken, mascara-wearing, dirty pirate who didn’t seem all that surprised to find himself standing in a cauldron, in the company of a witch. Jack Sparrow had instead acted like this was par the course. And then asked if they had any rum laying around.

 

A sudden explosion of curses drew Dawn out of her thoughts of Giles and right back to the current situation. She eyed the closed bathroom door with an angry eye. Willow had deemed her far too young to help with the latest crisis involving their new swashbuckling houseguest, which Dawn personally thought was a load of crap. She was a whole seventeen years old now, more than old enough to help with bathing a pirate.

 

Not that it was necessarily something she wanted to be doing, nor was it something Willow felt enthusiastic about doing. But at this point, bathing the new guy was unavoidable. It took only seconds after the initial shock of his arrival wore off for the girls to notice the very bad odour coming from the man. It seemed years of dubious personal hygiene combined with Kraken phlegm did not make for the most pleasant smell. It took all of her willpower not to throw up right then and there.

 

The phone call to Giles had been made while Willow had been ushering Captain Jack Sparrow towards the nearest shower. She had shut the door on him, giving him explicit instructions to scrub until he was as red as a lobster, and had been prepared to leave it at that when the loud banging, cursing, and flood of water came through the cracks of the door. Apparently the good captain wasn’t used to twenty-first century plumbing.

 

That’s when Willow called down one of the younger male Neo-Watchers to bring down some spare clothes and to help her assist Jack with his hygiene problem. They had drawn him a bath, filled it with bubbles, and ordered him inside. It was at this point that Jack decided that he didn’t really feel like a bath and would much rather work on getting back to his boat. He probably said a few other things, maybe even made a horribly lecherous proposition to Willow, because sheer stubbornness wasn’t enough to drive Willow to curse so loudly and so vividly. Honestly, it was some of the most creative cussing Dawn had heard in years.

 

“Is he really a pirate?”

 

The question came from behind her, where a group of young Slayers had lined up just five minutes after young Marcus had been called down by Willow. Dawn answered without turning around. “Well, all signs seem to point to ‘yes’.”

 

“How did he get here?”

 

Dawn rolled her eyes, turning her head to give them an exasperated glare. “If we knew that, do you think we’d be wasting time with the bathing exercise instead of just sending him back the way he came?”

 

Rose, a redheaded girl from Iowa, just snorted. “Hopefully, you would have done it anyway. I could smell him from down the hallway.”

 

There were murmurs of agreement from the small assembly of Slayers, and Dawn couldn’t really find it in her to argue with them. Old Jack smelled ranker than anything she had encountered before.

 

The cursing in the bathroom calmed for a second before being picked up again. Only this time it wasn’t Willow. Jack Sparrow was hollering up a storm, but most of his words were indecipherable. Dawn frowned and tilted her head slightly to one side as she listened carefully. It almost sounded as if Jack was trying to talk with his mouth full.

 

The door to the bathroom opened suddenly and out stormed Willow. The woman in question was in a sorry state. Her hair was wet and stuck in clumps around her head. There were large dark splotches all over her clothes, indicators of how hard the task of bathing a pirate could be. Willow fixed all her spectators with a very grumpy look as she wiped bunches of bubbles off her face. “What are you standing around for? Show’s over!”

 

And with that, Willow was stomping towards her workroom. Dawn watched her go, wincing when the redhead slammed her workroom door shut with incredible force. Awed silence followed in her wake for a good couple of minutes.

 

“Good thing she isn’t a Slayer,” Rose mused from behind her. “Otherwise that door would be in pieces.”

 

Another around of consenting murmurs. Dawn shook her head. Didn’t they have anything better to do than to stand around making blatantly obvious statements?

 

Marcus was the next person to leave the bathroom, the Watcher in pretty much same shape as Willow. He eased the door shut and then looked up, seemingly surprised to find an audience waiting. The surprise was soon replaced with disapproval. “Weren’t you girls supposed to report to Arlene for hand-to-hand lessons?”

 

“Yeah, but this is more fun,” Rose responded, a big wide smile on her face.

 

Marcus just shook his head and pointed towards the staircase. “Go, or you’ll be forfeiting your chocolate rations for a week.”

 

There wasn’t even a second of hesitation. Dawn had to bite her lip to keep from laughing as the entire group of girls and fled in a state of panic. Nothing could motivate teenagers so aptly as a threat to their chocolate supply. Whoever thought up of that particular tactic had to be a sadistic person. She was putting her money on Faith.

 

“So, what’s going on in there?” Dawn indicated the bathroom with a nod of her head.

 

All disapproval vanished and soon Marcus was the picture of exasperation. “That has to be the most impossible creature on God’s green earth!” The man raked a hand through wet blonde hair. “First he agreed the smell warranted a bath. Then he decided it took too long and he wanted to find his ship. Lord, you should hear him blather on about this ‘Black Pearl’ of his. Makes it sound like the bloody Holy Grail! And then he makes the most inappropriate proposition to Miss Rosenburg-”

 

“I get the picture,” Dawn interjected, raising her hand to stop the man. “Don’t suppose you might have gotten any useful information out of him?”

 

“As far as I can tell, he’s a pirate, most definitely from the later half of the seventeenth century, but we can’t tack down a date. He’s a bit too confused about that himself,” Marcus paused and gave the closed door a brief glare. “But he has given up various names and locales. Port Royal in the Caribbean being the most helpful. It was a British colony, and you know how the British love to catalogue data on their activities. If he’s as famous as he claims, a little research should allow us to verify his story.”

 

“And if we can’t verify his story?”

 

“Well, we’ll let Mr. Giles deal with that,” Marcus said with shrug. “In the meantime, I think I should head up to the library. The sooner we know, the better. You can wait for him, if you like, but it might be a while.”

 

Dawn nodded, stopping for a second to listen to Jack’s gurgled shouts from the bathroom. “What is he doing in there, anyway?”

 

A wicked smile curved Marcus’s lips. “Well, remember that inappropriate proposition? Miss Rosenburg fulfilled it, in a way. She’s seen to bathing him personally, though he probably didn’t intend for her to make use of her magic.”

 

Dawn chuckled softly. “What did she do to him?”

 

“Oh, nothing,” Marcus brushed off, that grin still on his face. “She just employed some very powerful magical words to ensure a thorough cleaning.”

 

“What words?”

 

“Lather. Rinse. Repeat.”

 

~*~


	3. Chapter 3  Mrs. Jack Sparrow

After forty-five minutes, Dawn began to wonder if Willow had thought to put a time limit on her clean-up spell. As she watched a mound of bubbles and a pool of water emerge from under the bathroom door, Dawn made the decision to turn away from the sounds of Captain Jack’s screams and go alert Willow to her magical oversight.

 

Five minutes later, she was following behind a slightly embarrassed witch back down to the bathroom. The spell was lifted, Jack regained some coherency, and thus began an extremely childish argument between witch and pirate that only ended when Willow once again used magic on their guest. Dawn listened intently as Jack shrilled his way through Willow’s drying and dressing spell as the witch in question just stomped back down to her workroom. It would be a full fifteen minutes before Jack’s current dilemma would end and the pirate managed to stumble out of the bathroom.

 

Much to Dawn’s surprised, once cleaned up and no longer smelling of Kraken phlegm, Captain Jack Sparrow was not too hard on the eyes, if you caught her drift. Actually, dressed in a pair of track pants and a plain grey shirt, hair washed, dried, and combed, and face devoid of makeup and dirt-Dawn had to admit the Captain was a hottie.

 

“In all my years at sea, through the mutinies, the arrests, the relentless pursuit by the Royal Navy-never have I been so thoroughly mistreated and abused!” Jack’s seemed to swell up with anger, but deflated so fast she thought she might have imagined it. His eyes lost their momentary fire and took on a more speculative look as he looked down in the direction of Willow’s workroom. “Lass?”

 

Dawn rolled her eyes. “My name is Dawn,” she reminded him.

 

“Yes, whatever, tell me something? Would your witchy friend there ever be so inclined to turn on a man that had arrived to help her? Kiss him and lie to him before tying him to the ship’s mast and leaving him at the mercy of one of the most notorious monsters that ever terrorized the seas?”

 

Dawn was sensing a back story here. “Uh, I don‘t think so. Willow‘s not really the tying up type. Why?”

 

“Splendid!” Jack clapped his hands together, ignoring her question as he headed towards the workroom. “She’s not married, is she?”

 

This was heading in a very bad direction. “Jack, I don’t really think you’re her type, if that’s where you’re heading with this.”

 

“Nonsense, I get on brilliantly with witches,” Jack countered. “Even gave one my only undead monkey once.”

 

Undead monkey? “Undead monkey?”

 

But Jack was already at the workroom door and barrelling his way through it. Dawn trotted after him, noting the irritated look that crossed Willow’s face at the sight of the pirate. Dawn hoped Jack wasn’t really seriously contemplating what she thought he was contemplating, because Willow didn’t really seem to be in a good enough mood to suffer through it.

 

“Well, then, I don’t suppose my ship turned up in there?” Jack asked, indicating the newly washed cauldron that Willow had just set up.

 

Willow just glared at him, and so Dawn darted in front of the pirate in hopes of diverting another argument like before. “So, more soup?”

 

“Dawn really,” Willow sounded exasperated. Too exasperated in fact. Dawn frowned for a second before realizing what the problem was.

 

“Andrew got wind of this, didn’t he?”

 

The look on her face said it all. Dawn felt her insides churn a bit. She adored Andrew, she really did. After the Sunnydale collapse, he had come into his own and was certainly less annoying than before. And he was a good, dependable, hard-working guy that gave his all. The only problem was that while he was less annoying in general, Andrew was occasionally so aggravating that she was tempted to toss him into a bottomless pit.

 

Meeting a real live pirate could prove to be one of those occasions.

 

“He just sounded so excited,” Willow grumbled. “Not like I could tell him not to come. Then he’d get all mopey and sad, then I’d get sad, and things would just spiral out of control from there on out.”

 

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I was hoping we could turn the conversation around to something I want to talk about,” Jack interjected as he stumbled his way over to Willow’s cauldron. “Are you very sure you didn’t see anything about my ship in here?”

 

“Will you shut up about that stupid ship?” Willow snapped. “It’s not like it can do you any good right now. So just stop it with the freaking ship already!”

 

“’Stupid’?” Jack repeated, seemingly oblivious to the rest of Willow’s rant. For the first time since he stepped out of Willow’s witch soup, Jack Sparrow looked mildly irritated. “I will have you know that the Pearl is not just a ‘stupid’ ship. It’s my ship-I bartered my soul for that ship-”

 

“And then you got swallowed by a Kraken,” Willow cut in. “Your brilliant ship did you loads of good then, didn’t it?”

 

Dawn sensed that this might get out of control any second now. “Okay, I think that we should all just step back and remember that we’re actually working toge-”

 

“I’d advise you to stay away from the topic of that there Kraken,” Jack almost growled. “It’s not something I wish to dwell on, savvy?”

 

“Well, your damn boat isn’t anything I want to dwell on, so savvy yourself buddy!”

 

Dawn sighed and rubbed at her temples. It seemed like there was going to be another go around at the immature squabbling. Great. Fantastic. Why hadn’t she agreed to go with Buffy? Even watching her sister strangle her boyfriend with her tongue was becoming more appealing than this.

 

“Um, excuse me?”

 

Dawn glared at the intruder, a blonde Slayer who couldn’t be older than fifteen and whose name escaped her at the moment. Something with an “M”. Maureen? Marlene? “Mary, aren’t you supposed to be in hand-to-hand with Arlene?”

 

“The name is Melanie,” the girl retorted quickly. Dawn winced. Wrong name, but she was right about the “M” thing. “And besides, hand-to-hand ended like ten minutes ago?”

 

This somehow managed to penetrate the thick cloud of immature name-calling that had surrounded Willow and Captain Jack. The witch paused in mid-sentence and gave the newcomer a curious look. “Hand-to-hand is supposed to last two hours. You guys were barely up there for one hour.”

 

“Yeah, but it got cancelled ‘cause of the news.”

 

Well, that was a new one. “The news?”

 

“Oh yeah, it’s all over the television. Some creepy, ratty old boat appeared in the middle of Lake Erie over night. No one knows how, and there’s a huge hoopla over it. Marcus said to come get you guys and the smelly pirate guy. Something about black sails.”

 

Jack emitted some sort of weird squeaking noise. “The Pearl!”

 

Dawn felt like her head was going to explode. “Please do not tell me that the man’s stupid boat is in Lake Erie.”

 

Melanie smirked. “All right, I won’t tell you. But if you turn on the TV, CNN will be more than happy to show you.”

 

“CNN?” Willow looked very pale. “The CNN?”

 

“Is there more than one?” Melanie was turning out to be quite the snide one.

 

“Captain Sparrow’s boat is floating around Lake Erie, the national news network is reporting on it, and Giles still hasn’t phoned to tell us what to do.” Dawn nodded to herself, and then her mind went blank.

 

What the hell were they supposed to do now?

 

~*~


	4. Chapter 4  Culture Shock

Though it had been a little amusing to see Jack Sparrow have hysterics over the supposed shrinking and imprisonment of his precious Pearl into a ‘damnable black box’, Dawn found that the situation quickly lost its entertainment value. Especially once Jack had come to understand that his boat wasn’t actually locked in the television set. This realization sent the crazy Captain into a whirlwind of revelations, first and foremost being that he was very far from home.

 

And once he conceived how far, that’s when Dawn suspected that Jack began to feel a bit of fear. As it was, the sheer implications of the TV and the stereo system in the Common Room seemed a bit too mind-blowing for their simple little pirate. But once the Slayers started popping in movies, rewinding and forwarding and pausing random scenes, Jack Sparrow had had enough.

 

Willow retired him to one of the spare bedrooms. Dawn had been stunned. She wasn’t aware that there were spare rooms. Everything she had seen had led her to believe this place was bursting at the seams it was so full. She was assuming the lack of space was the reason why she was sleeping on the floor of Willow’s room. But she was starting to suspect that might not be the reason after all. And if it hadn’t been for the sudden appearance of Jack’s huge pirate ship in the middle of Lake Erie, and the subsequent CNN coverage, Dawn probably would have made a big stink about it.

 

So she resolved to make a little stink out of it.

 

“Why does the pirate get his own room and I get your floor?” Dawn asked, making sure to draw out a few of her words to make them that much more annoying.

 

“Because the pirate is on the verge of complete emotional collapse, and the last time we left you to your own devices, you burnt a hole through the floor,” Willow didn’t even bother looking up as she explained. She was too busy flipping through one of her many witch textbooks to find an answer for all their problems. Dawn doubted there was anything in any of them that gave instructions on how to handle a pirate ship magically appearing in Lake Erie while its captain has a nervous breakdown three doors over.

 

But hey, she had been wrong before.

 

“Those aren’t going to help.” She just didn’t think now was one of those times.

 

Willow snapped her book shut with a bit more force than necessary. It caused dust to fly up everywhere, and most importantly, right up Willow’s nose. And then she was sneezing, so that any look of reprimand she had planned had flown the coop. Dawn loved it when she won by default.

 

Before Willow could gather up for round two, Marcus suddenly appeared at the doorway looking very much askew. Dawn frowned at the sight of him. “Did you just go for a nooner in one of the broom closets?”

 

“Dawn!”

 

Okay, now Willow was starting to sound genuinely mad. Dawn decided to pull it back just a bit. Maybe being annoying wasn’t the way to go today.

 

Marcus, though very much British and therefore very much flustered by what she had suggested, got down to business. “I found him.”

 

“Giles?” Dawn was being too hopeful.

 

“Uh, no, I wasn’t looking for Mr. Giles. I was looking for our smelly little friend. And I found him.”

 

“Well duh. He’s like two doors down.”

 

“In the books Dawn. He found him in the books.” Willow’s face was getting kind of red. And one of her nostrils was twitching. Dawn suspected the witch was nearing the end of her rope. It might have been funny if she wasn’t scared Willow would go ape shit on her if she laughed.

 

“Yes, well, he might be who he says he is,” Marcus steamrolled on, like he wasn’t in the company of two infuriating Americans. What a trooper. “I found mentions of a Captain Jack Sparrow in the first stages of research. Janet even found some information on him through that blasted machine-”

 

“-Computer-”

 

“Yes, whatever.” Dawn had to shake her head. Watchers!

 

“So, what does the research say? He’s not wanted for murder or anything too heinous, is he?”

 

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Marcus seemed a bit uncomfortable. Dawn realized he probably hadn’t thought about that possibility. “But I do know that he has had quite the track record with magic. What with the cursed Aztec gold, undead pirates, mythical sea creatures-”

 

“Undead pirates?” Willow looked kind of upset by that little bit. “You mean he’s dealt with zombie pirates or something?”

 

“Well, not quite. These pirates weren’t technically dead, but they were undead for a while, and they weren’t, and then most of them were really dead soon after. I think.”

 

And the award for Most Incoherent British Blather goes to . . .

 

“What?” Willow shook her head. “Whatever, I don’t think that I want to know. All I really want to know is if there’s a way for us to make sure he’s really who he says he is, and what the hell brought him here.”

 

“Well, the one of the tidbits we found tells of how Captain Jack Sparrow suddenly disappeared one day, taking his ship with him,” Marcus was scratching his nose as he read from his notes. Dawn wondered if that meant he was confused, or it was just something that he did. “Most accounts attribute his disappearance to some foolhardy pact he had made with Davy Jones some thirteen years before.”

 

Okay, now Dawn had to butt in. “Davy Jones?” she repeated, her eyebrows practically up to her hairline. “As in Davy Jones’s Locker, Davy Jones?”

 

“Well, er, yes.”

 

Willow dropped her witch books and rubbed at her temples. “Okay, he made a pact with Davy Jones, of Davy Jones’s Locker, which makes Mr. Jones the Mephistopheles of the sea, or something?”

 

“It would appear so.”

 

“Okay and what about the Kraken? What’s that thing got to do with it?”

 

“Well, apparently Davy Jones can call it to do his bidding, but that’s just hearsay.”

 

Dawn rolled her eyes. “We have anything other than hearsay? Say like actual fact?”

 

Marcus glowered a bit. “I’m working on it.”

 

“So is CNN. Let’s see who’s faster.”

 

Willow was probably going to scold her for that one, but before she had the chance, there was a stampede of Slayers that deposited themselves right in between the three of them.

 

“We’ve got a problem!” one of the older looking blondes yelled. Dawn squinted at her. Beth?

 

“What’s wrong, Betty?”

 

Crap, so close.

 

“Well, it’s that thing with the pirate. We left him in the room because you said he needed peace and quiet so he didn’t completely freak out. So we left, and then we went back to check, because he’s a pirate and kind of cute, but anyway, he’s not there.”

 

Willow blinked. “He’s what?”

 

“He’s not there,” Betty repeated. “And the window was open. We think he’s making a break for it.”

 

“What’s ‘it‘?” Marcus couldn’t help but ask.

 

“The only ‘it’ there could be for him. He’s gone after that damn boat.”

 

Dawn snorted. “And how does the genius plan on getting there?”

 

Willow shook her head. “I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Get the older girls in cars and the others on foot. I want Captain Sparrow found and brought back immediately before someone finds him.”

 

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Knowing our luck, he’ll end up as a guest on Larry King Live before we find him.”

 

Willow gave her an exasperated look, but didn’t disagree. She only waved her hands at the Slayers dismissively, and off went the Slayer Stampede in the direction it had come from. Dawn hopped to her feet and followed.

 

There was a manhunt to organize.

 

~*~


End file.
